Ghostcrawler
It's cool if you found a lot of interesting choices in the 4.3 talent builds. I just want to make sure you understand that you're in the minority.
I think you mentioned paladin, so I'll throw out a few examples.
- 100% of Retribution paladins on live in North America have Zealotry. I couldn't find a single one without. It makes sense. Zealotry is decently fun and a definite DPS upgrade.
- 2% of Retribution paladins have the Eternal Glory talent. One can argue that some of those may just be user error. Maybe a few of them found the talent really useful though.
- 75% of Retribution paladins have Repentance. Okay, that starts to get a little interesting. One can assume that most paladins find the talent useful, but some find other choices more compelling. Unlike Zealotry or Eternal Glory, I would argue that Repentance is an interesting choice. Incidentally, we left it as a choice in the 5.0 talent trees.
- 20% have Selfless Healer, though if you look at players who PvP a lot, it jumps up to over 90%. Here is another interesting talent (by which I mean not a no-brainer) and it's also a talent we left in 5.0 in a modified form.
So here is another talent tree model we could have used: we could have given you 12 or more talent rows, and left some of them as no-brainers. Maybe we put Art of War up against Reckoning. I bet most Ret paladins would take Art of War. So we saved you having to make a button click and just gave it to you.
(Aside: I've said before that we do think there is room in the game for some safe choices. Sometimes clicking a button that you're 100% certain you are going to click is still fun. That kind of "choice" has its place. We just don't think the talent trees are the best place for that design, given that some of the rows are supposed to be real choices and some would just be "feel good about yourself" choices.)
There is yet another model where we somehow make Reckoning just as competitive as Art of War for Ret paladins. That might be an exciting model, but it's also pretty overwhelming both for us to develop and for you to learn and master. The combinatorial effects for even a six tier talent tree are enormous.
We aren't done with the new talent trees, but you also shouldn't assume that everything is so in flux that it isn't worth giving feedback. If you feel there are no-brainers, let us know specifically which choices you're talking about and why. Is it just a manner of number tuning? Is it a case of just your play style and that others might disagree?
(Please don't do that in this thread though -- we have a whole forum for beta class feedback, and we read all of the posts.)
With spells, glyphs, and talents being so far spread out (as well as automatically being granted spells), folks who are leveling new toons in beta aren't feeling as though their character is improving over time